Improvements to Onshape - March 1st, 2019

Our third release of 2019 comes with some great usability improvements! We hope you enjoy these!

CAD IMPROVEMENTS

RE-ORDER OF SELECTIONS IN LOFT, FILL, AND OTHER FEATURES

Rather than having to delete and re-select the items, you can now re-order selections in many order-dependent features.

FILTERING WITH FEATURE FOLDERS

The Feature List now has a discoverable button to allow the filtering of the features in your Part Studio.

USING IMPLICIT MATE CONNECTORS AS FEATURE REFERENCES

There are a number of features in Onshape that accept Mate Connectors as a reference to define them. However, these Mate Connectors had to be explicitly created before they could be used. Onshape now supports the creation of Implicit Mate Connectors in these features, enabled by simply toggling a button. Take a look at how this might improve your feature workflow in the video below.

ORDINATE DIMENSIONS IMPROVEMENTS

In an Ordinate Dimension stack, jogs will automatically be created to avoid overlapping other dimensions if additional text is added, or the dimension text resized. If a jog is accidentally created on an Ordinate Dimension, simply drag-and-drop the dimension to remove the jog.

MEASURE IMPROVEMENTS

Measuring the distance to or from the Origin is now as simple as selecting your reference, and picking the Origin. The measurement shows in the bottom right corner.

Selecting any number of faces, even in an assembly, now shows the total area of all faces selected in the bottom right corner.

Performance is looked at with every Onshape release. With this update, there were two performance improvements worth highlighting. First, Thumbnail caching has been improved. You will immediately experience faster performance in generating thumbnails, especially for linked documents with many tabs. Additionally, Onshape has improved view creation for Crop, Broken-out Section, and Section Depth views. This will be most noticeable on large assemblies and complex views.

PER-USER CONFIGURATIONS

With this release, we've added functionality to make collaborating and sharing configured Part Studios and Assemblies even more convenient.

ADDITIONAL PEM® FASTENERS

PennEnginering PEM® Flush-head (FH™) Studs and Pins have been added to to the Hole feature, and Onshape Standard content.

SEARCHING ACROSS DROPBOX AND GOOGLE DRIVE

Two releases ago, we introduced the capability to integrate with Google Drive and Dropbox. We now enable searching in these connected services. Additionally, Onshape now remembers the last location that a file was imported from or exported to within a connected cloud service.

JSON IMPORT IN FEATURESCRIPT

With this release, FeatureScript now accepts JSON imports and reference parameter selections. JSON is a lightweight data type that can structure complex datasets. This is an easy way for your Custom Features to consume output data from other tools.

PROFESSIONAL FEATURES

RELEASE COMMENTS NOTIFY USERS INVOLVED

Comments created by anyone on a pending Release Candidate now notify all those involved in the process (the creator of the Release Candidate, the Approver, and any Observers).

Please take a moment to try out these new features and improvements and leave your comments below. For a detailed list of all the changes in this update, please see the changelog.

Remember: The updates listed here are now live for all users when creating new Documents and over the next few days these features will also be available in Documents created before the date of this update.

Love the RE-ORDER OF SELECTIONS, yet it needs to be expanded to mate connectors. yes, we can flip, rotate & ....... but instead of doing a negative offset, reordering"flipping" the two selections would be very nice!!!

Also, hello @Roy_Mutalik 🕵️May I ask who you are and what you do at Onshape?

Hi there, @owen_sparks (and the rest of the wonderful Onshape community)I'm an engineer on the Strategic/Enterprise team here. Of course, I also work closely with the rest of the crew you already know. Previously, I spent 6+ years working in "Old CAD" before seeing the light and joining the team at Onshape. I'm looking forward to "meeting", helping, and sharing more great Onshape content with each of you here on the forums and beyond.

What an elegant way to locate the holes ‘on the fly’ without the need of sketching points first. It is even possible now to drill the holes slanting. However, then arises an undercut. The workaround is moving the Mate Connector along the Z-axis, but that offset can conflict with the design intent, e.g. when the 'drill angle' changes the value can be too small (or too big because the hole cuts unexpected elements then). Is there in this case a possibility to generate the hole in both sides without translation of the Z-axis?

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Onshape adds once again features expected from users as well as features that exceed expectations! And as always, useful features that work and all without having to cross your fingers when implementing the update!

You revolutionize the world of CAD every 3 weeks, one update at a time!

It's so cool how you guys sit down and think of ways of how to improve every bit of this awesome piece of software. And of course also how you respond to the community.

I work with all major CAD systems that are out there and one thing really astonished me. In my experience, every CAD software has a few features or workflow tricks that really are awesome and improve productivity a lot. But in every CAD it's something different so you always think why didn't they do it the way it is done in this program and the other way around. But in onshape, you took all the great things and packed it into one single software.

Implicit mate connectors are just perfect! This update saved my weekend believe me! Keep up this awesome work and stay loyal to the community!

The best thing with MC's is that they now are instantly avaliable for sketch definition

Absolutely! When you use MCs as a sketch plane for Sweeps or Extrudes with offsets you can immediately reduce the number of Planes and feature clutter without losing design intent.

@NeilCooke and @konstantin_shiriazdanov,With this new functionality (also new as sketch reference?) it would be nice to rotate a MC along two (or even 3?) axis. Can this already be done in a way or do we need an IR?

Then a sketch plane and tilted hole can be placed under every angle relative to the origin entity.In this picture the extra 'Rotation about X' should do the job.

agree, todays ability to define only one rotation for MC is pretty limiting, I think we should be able to perform the sequence of MC orientation changes of any length, not just 3 axis linear offset and 1 axis rotation. [...]

Do you mean resulting in a MC at an undefined location? I this wise? One wants to have specific distances and angles to keep design intent, isn't it?

agree, todays ability to define only one rotation for MC is pretty limiting, I think we should be able to perform the sequence of MC orientation changes of any length, not just 3 axis linear offset and 1 axis rotation. [...]

Do you mean resulting in a MC at an undefined location? I this wise? One wants to have specific distances and angles to keep design intent, isn't it?

I mean that with triad manipulator we could perform any sequence of MC orientation changes - not just 3 linear and then 1 rotational as it is now, for example you could rotate it around triad X, then rotate around triad Y and then move along triad Z - which is not possible today. Also would be nice to log this transform sequence in the MC feature inteface as list input so that we could edit it at any stage.